The wilderness is just next door, still.  When I was a child of two or three our family lived in a place called Kapua where my father worked as a foreman tending a macadamia orchard of several thousand acres that had been carved out of the native forest.  We lived in a house on the edge of orchard, just two houses together, ours and the manager’s.  Across the lane that led to the two houses there was a little stand of ohi`a, the predominant native tree of that forest.  My father would tie the Shetland pony that he’d bought for me to graze under those trees.  Ohi`a are majestic and mysterious trees, whose small, stiff grey-green leaves are homes to many insects and whose orange, red, or yellow flowers are the source of nectar for many species of native birds.  Those trees, as I remember them, were decked in jewels and would sing to me sometimes when I went out to see my pony, who was a bad-tempered beast that bucked me off more than once and generally seemed to hate his lot in life, but that I loved anyway.  Because he lived under the trees in the wilderness across the road, my Hundred-acre Wood of less than an acre, and because it is in my blood, on both sides, to have an unreasonable affection for horses. 

We may think, having grown-up, that we forever exiled from such places but it is not so.  It is only fear and shame and forgetfulness that keeps us away.  The training that begins at four or five, that makes us managers and mechanics, scholars and salespeople tears us away from such places of wilderness.  But there is a childish wisdom in being able to find glory in a few trees and a bit of grass.  There is no fabulous wealth or power on earth that can buy or compel the song of the trees, or the experience of their unveiled beauty.  They are not so far away, those places.